As noted before Ground Zeroes was announced as a separate game, it’s a prologue to Phantom Pain, serving as a tutorial for the latter. Interestingly, there’s no dynamic weather or day/night cycle in Ground Zeroes with the main story mission limited to the night when it’s raining. At least you’re able to experience other times of the day via the side missions.

The Phantom Pain will see a lot of features from Peace Walker such as recruiting soldiers and building your base. They won’t be in Ground Zeroes, which won’t feature the fulton recovery system. You can still choose to free optional captives with a helicopter though.

Ground Zeroes’ save data will carry over into Phantom Pain and there will be benefits for those who complete the side-missions in the former. In fact, if you pick up both games, you may receive some additional content in Phantom Pain. Kojima hasn’t worked out what that content will be but is hashing it out currently.

Kojima also reveals that Ground Zeroes is being release first because The Phantom Pain is taking a good long while to release. It will have a large amount of content, but the marketing team and Kojima decided to release Ground Zeroes first as a prologue so gamers can experience some of the game sooner rather than later.

As mentioned previously, both games will feature second screen support with smartphones and tablets that can display leaderboards. A map display on your mobile is being looked into, since Kojima doesn’t want attention divided between the two screens.

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is pegged for an early 2014 release on PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PS3. PlayStation-exclusive content was recently announced at the PS4’s All Access launch event in which players could experience a new “Deju Vu” mission featuring the old Solid Snake model from MGS 1. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is expected to release in either 2014 or 2015 depending on the success of Ground Zeroes.